Authors — Pamela Cohn
-
A Port City’s Cinema Dreams: Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Turns 20
The boundaries between these two genres [fiction and documentary] are porous. One must feel a documentaristic texture in fiction and create characters in documentaries. – Agnès Varda It’s at once deceiving and heartening to attend a film festival in a gloriously beautiful place that appears to be thriving, not only with arts and culture galore, but what appears to be a robust consumer culture as well — plenty of high-end shops, bars, restaurants and clubs filled to capacity. Especially when the sun goes down, in typical Balkan fashion, everyone comes out to promenade, eat, smoke, drink and debate until the […]
by Pamela Cohn on Mar 19, 2018 -
A Visual Portrait of a Profoundly Internal Person: Finlay Pretsell on His Original Take on the Cycling Doc, Time Trial
Hearing the phrase “a decade in the making” is not that unusual in feature documentary circles, particularly for those stories that, on the surface, look fairly simple and straightforward, yet somehow beg to be told on a big screen. That long duration, though oftentimes frustrating, lends itself to finding the more peripheral, ephemeral elements around the main story. So many documentaries about athletes are reliant upon heavy use of archival footage and sit-down interviews with everyone whoever knew the person, with family members, friends, fellow athletes and coaches all weighing in to form a portrait of the protagonist as champion, […]
by Pamela Cohn on Mar 9, 2018 -
True/False: Chico Pereira on His Modern-Day Documentary Pastorale, Donkeyote
Contained within its sly title, as well as its inventive narrative, Spanish filmmaker Chico Pereira’s second nonfiction feature, Donkeyote, is a modern-day pastorale, at once an homage to the director’s childhood hero, his Uncle Manolo, and Miguel de Cervantes’ classic tale of a man who sets out to become one of the heroes of his own imagination. The story weaves together fragments of memory, dreams, metaphysics — and a good dose of illusion. Playing the role of Sancho Panza is the elegant, stalwart and self-possessed donkey of the title, a burro called Gorrión (“sparrow”, in Spanish). With his dog Zafrana […]
by Pamela Cohn on Mar 3, 2017 -
True/False: Anna Zamecka on Her Transcendent Documentary Debut, Communion
First-time Polish director Anna Zamecka watched many films in preparation for shooting her début feature, Komunia / Communion. Inspired by many works of both fiction and nonfiction, one in particular had an emotional impact. Nagisa Oshima’s Boy (Shonen) from 1969 is based on real events reported in Japanese newspapers at the time about Toshio Omura, a boy forced by a conniving father to participate in dangerous scams in order for him to stay with the family. While Zamecka’s young protagonist, Ola — a 12-year-old living with Marek, her alcoholic father, and Nikodem, her autistic brother, in a cramped and crumbling-down […]
by Pamela Cohn on Mar 2, 2017 -
Coming of Age While Dying: Henry Corra on Farewell to Hollywood
In the late ‘70s, Henry Corra was attending Franconia College, a small experimental liberal arts school in New Hampshire. While there, he and his classmates watched a film called Grey Gardens. Immediately upon graduation, with a smoking-hot performing arts degree in hand, he made his way to New York City and made a beeline to the offices of Albert and David Maysles, the directors of this film that had galvanized him. He told them he wanted to work for them. They promptly hired him. The first time I met Henry was in 2008 at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). […]
by Pamela Cohn on Feb 18, 2015 -
The Reagan Years Producer Sierra Pettengill on the Textures of Archival Footage, the Value of Community and Pitching at CPH:FORUM
In the decade after graduating magna cum laude from Boston University, Sierra Pettengill hasn’t wasted much time carving a niche for herself in competitive New York City as an award-winning producer. Originally from nearby Nassau County, she has utilized her wide-ranging interests, innate curiosity, whip-smart instincts and indefatigable work ethic to establish herself rather quickly in an increasingly tough marketplace. She was exposed early on in her career to the PBS model as an associate producer for American Experience’s Walt Whitman (an Emmy Award nominee in 2008), and Triangle Fire, a Peabody Award recipient in 2009. She would partner again […]
by Pamela Cohn on Nov 11, 2014
